


The Long Winter

by Liminality (TyndallBlue)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, John tends to the garden, Past Drug Use, Slash Goggles, the author took a metaphor and ran like hell, the heart is a garden
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2018-01-08 02:44:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TyndallBlue/pseuds/Liminality
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After every Winter there is Spring.  Sherlock thought himself the exception to that rule.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Long Winter

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Have Our Fire and Laugh](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124052) by [aderyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn). 



> "And at night wrapped in the bed of ashes  
> In one breath I wake"  
> -"When You Go Away" by W.S. Merwin

Sherlock had neglected his heart. He knew he had one of course, had once inspected it after the last of the snow had melted. (Beautiful, numb, icy snow, a blanket of white thrumming his veins, sometimes tempered by an expert dilution of morphine.) When he turned the soil he found it full of ash and salt. He had grimaced as he tasted it, remembering salty sweat and flesh under his lips. The rancor of overful bins in the alley and - oh wasn't the whole thing just _hateful_? Knowing it infertile, knowing because he was Sherlock Holmes and he didn't presume anything, walked away.

Mycroft visited once, after the whole ugly affair, peering curiously over the gate surveying the razed garden with a neutral expression. He worked his jaw, swallowed, and strode off with the umbrella tapping the worn leather of his shoe.

Lestrade didn’t even make it all the way up the garden path before declaring it an exercise in pointlessness.

Nobody else tried. Though Sherlock did suspect Mycroft had it under surveillance. Declaring it condemned. He locked the gate to his heart with The Work.

Then there was John. And he couldn’t understand how there ever wasn’t John. How had he ever subsisted in such darkness before this brilliant conductor of light? Light that filtered murkily through little coughs of ash kicked up by John’s sensible loafers. Sherlock secretly thrilled in knowing it would settle into the edges of his uppers and into the fiber of his socks and that when he left, some of Sherlock’s heart would leave with him.

John had frowned at what he saw, clucked his tongue at the tilted trellis of his ribcage before dutifully righting it. Sherlock bit his lips as John flicked a tidy, clean nail over it’s peeling paint. He explored the whole of the garden, even stooping to trace a finger of the charred stone surrounding empty beds.

He came back the next day with fresh paint.

The woman. He hadn’t seen her enter, just that suddenly she was there, wrapped in his coat, the hems trailing the soil. Soil? When had it been anything more than ash and dust? Her sodalite bright eyes took in the fresh paint and she smirked knowingly. Relishing the aversion of his gaze as her Loboutins toed the mulch John had laid that morning over breakfast.

Moriarty took one look and just _knew_. How did everyone just _know_? His slick, olive-dark eyes dragging over the tidy beds full of wine-dark mums and marigolds. They were good flowers, resilient, dependable, unassuming. Sherlock loved them. Adored them.

He watched the man walk the paths, still charred but neat now, dragging a pale finger along the equally pale, freshly what-washed fence. With a wet snap, the intruder broke the stem of a sunflower. He stared as the clear effluent trickled over a milky wrist. Shuddered as the man bent his neck and lapped, kitten-like and intimate at the mess, because for the first time after a long winter, Sherlock had a heart to burn.


End file.
